‘Dougie,’ said Deputy Commissioner Görcar cordially, as if inviting him to be best man at his wedding, ‘we’re obliged to formally review this operation and your conduct and the circumstances of the shooting. All thirty-seven SCO19 officers who shot Gogarty have been suspended prior to a full investigation. However, informally I have to tell you: well done. It’s obvious that Gogarty was in alliance with the hell creature, not a mere pawn, and you dealt with him in a wholly appropriate fashion.’
None of this came as a surprise to Dougie. The Deputy Commissioner was not only a smooth talking Turk; he was a golfing pal of Roy Hall’s. He knew the score.
For Roy was the one who had masterminded this whole cover up. In the scant few hours available to him, Dougie had failed in his attempts to get to the top of the Warlock Council as he’d hoped to do. He’d called Maggie Osborne and she’d blown him off. He’d phoned an MP he knew at the London Parliament but the guy just didn’t have the contacts to get to Brannigan. So finally, at 3am, Dougie had had to call Roy Hall at home and beg the bastard for his support.
And to his credit, Roy had come through. He’d believed Dougie’s story without demurral. Then he’d made the necessary calls, and pulled the requisite strings. He’d made sure the Warlocks were fully briefed about the existence of a rogue member of their kind. He’d arranged for the body to be dealt with by police officers who were loyal only to him, and who would break the continuity of evidence by abducting Gogarty’s corpse from the undertaker’s car. After that, Roy’s men had skilfully beheaded the body, ripped the heart out and burned it; invited a Grey-Beard to incant over the remains; before finally delivering Gogarty to the mortuary as an empty shell.
It was now obvious to Dougie that all this had happened before. Roy was too unsurprised by it all, too efficient in dealing with the situation. Dougie was convinced that Gogarty wasn’t the first warlock to go rogue, and he wouldn’t be the last. But the world would never know that.
The fix was well and truly in.
Even though he knew he was doing the right thing, Dougie found the whole affair deeply depressing. It was just like those terrible Carter Street days all over again; but with magic.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Dougie said.
‘An evil killer has been taken off our streets,’ Görcar pontificated.
‘And not before time,’ said Dougie, fervently.
This prompted a general murmuring of solidarity around the table in the Commissioner’s briefing room on the top floor of New Scotland Yard. Even Belair joined in. Whatever else he might be, the man was no fool.
Through the window of the fifth floor room Dougie could see the zebra-striped campanile of the former Westminster Cathedral, struck by a shaft of sudden sunlight that had burst out between grey clouds. He felt like shit.
As he got up to leave, Roy Hall escorted him to the door, and patted him on the arm. He even winked.
‘Cheers Roy,’ Dougie forced himself to say, sotto voce.
Manju lifted off the green sheet. Beneath was the naked body of Brian Gogarty.
The injuries caused by the multiple gunshots were severe. The corpse was barely held together by flesh and bones. Bullets had ripped into Gogarty’s upper torso, his stomach, his head, his legs. One eye was a gaping hole. The throat had been shot through and there was an exit wound on the top of bald skull. Only the arms and lower limbs were untouched; a tribute to the quality of police marksmanship.
Manju had spent the last two hours cleaning the corpse. There was a ballistics expert waiting in the corridor to collect the bullet fragments. But Manju was perturbed; there was something wrong about this case.
Her doubts were first aroused when the body was delivered to her by three fit young undertakers with grim faces. They looked more like cops to her, not the cheery wankers you normally get working for funeral parlours.
And when she did her preliminary ultrasound scan of the body, she’d been alarmed at a bizarre and anomalous reading. This was yet to be confirmed in the PM, but it was pretty much beyond doubt. She was beginning to feel there was something strange, too, about the exterior of the corpse, though she didn’t as yet know what.
She decided to do a Dougie Randall on it.
She walked around the dissecting table, once, twice, thrice. Looking at the dead body in search of clues or intuition. Trying to feel the truth behind this death, rather than relying entirely on science. But she felt nothing.
She circled the table again, this time in the opposite direction. Still nothing.
‘The neck,’ said Thaddeus.
She looked up. Thaddeus Sullivan was standing there, gowned and bare-armed, grim-faced, chewing his nicotine ball.
She looked down and inspected the neck. She saw nothing amiss.
She took out a magnifying scope and peered closer. And now she could see tiny stitches in the skin of the neck, almost invisible, the work of a mechanical suturer of the kind that Gogarty himself had used on his victims.
‘Someone cut the head off,’ Manju concluded.
‘I would say so.’
‘Then sewed it back on.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Post or ante-mortem?’ Manju asked.
Thaddeus frowned.
‘We can ascertain that by –’ Manju began.
‘No need. No ascertaining needed,’ said Thaddeus, in cold tones. ‘This man died of gunshot injuries. Any suspicion that the body was beheaded before or after his judicial execution is quite beyond our remit.’
Manju stared at a man who she had thought she knew.
‘You’re asking me to cover this up?’ she accused.
‘Not at all, I’m asking you to do your job, but not to exceed your, as I say, remit.’ His tone softened. ‘Please. I’m begging you, Manju. Don’t put yourself on the line. Life’s too short.’
‘I’m not sure I can –’
‘Please.’
Thaddeus’s wife had died of cancer when he was in his thirties. He’d been left with two daughters under ten and he’d raised the girls single-handed. It had not been easy, but he had done it well. And in the last five years, since she’d joined his mortuary, Manju had become part of Thaddeus’s tightly-knit nuclear family. She was now, pretty much, a third daughter to him. Which meant she was just as insolent, sarcastic and scornful towards Thaddeus as Rose and Lucy always were. And just as devoted to him too. He’d never begged her for anything before.
Manju thought quickly.
‘OK.’
‘Good.’
Dougie Randall entered.
‘Do your stuff,’ said Thaddeus.
‘What?’ Dougie said, distractedly.
‘You’ll want to view the body. Take your time.’
Dougie remained vacant, unfocused.
‘No need.’
‘No need?’
‘Just cut him open.’
‘This is him?’ asked Thaddeus. ‘This is definitely him? The man who killed Matthew Baker and Melissa Anderson and the rest?’
Dougie stiffened. His tone became formal. ‘No. I’m afraid not, Thaddeus. This is merely the killer’s confederate. The real murderer is a patch of scarlet gloop on a pavement in South East London.’
‘The demon.’
‘The demon Naberius. A serial killing demon who is now no longer in existence. We took him down, Thaddeus, we took him down hard.’
‘But you’re telling me that it’s over?’ said Thaddeus Sullivan. ‘Can you assure me of that, Dougie? It’s all I ask. Tell me it ends here.’
‘It ends here.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Manju burst in on this moment of mutual trust, with an explosion of rage: ‘What the fuck is going on here, Dougie?’
Thaddeus made a noise with his tongue, and turned away. Dougie stiffened.
‘I don’t think I follow your drift, Miss Lahane,’ Dougie said. All status and froideur.
‘The body was beheaded, ante or post mortem we don’t know whi
ch. But someone cut the head off then sewed it back on. And there’s no heart,’ said Manju, with abrupt candour.
Thaddeus frowned at her lack of discretion. Dougie smiled, but not nicely.
‘Yeah, that happens.’
‘What happens?’
‘Exploding bullet. Destroys an entire organ leaving no trace. The heart got shot into undetectable pieces, in other words.’
Dougie left it hanging there.
‘Can that happen?’ Manju asked Thaddeus.
‘Not in my experience, but I’ve read of such cases.’ He was deadpan. She couldn’t read him, or tell if he was lying.
‘The neck?’
‘We didn’t do that,’ said Dougie. ‘Maybe the demon cut the head off and stuck it back on. Then reanimated the corpse. It’s possible. Think about it. Don’t you agree that it’s possible?’
Manju nodded. That did make a certain sense.
‘We have guns, we don’t behead people,’ Dougie pointed out reasonably.
That made sense too. But Manju knew that Dougie was lying. And she didn’t like it.
‘Whatever,’ she shrugged.
‘When you’re ready, Thaddeus,’ Dougie prompted.
Manju turned the recorder on.
In the courtyard and environs of the office development known as 5 Broadgate a scream rent the night. A howl of pain.
The surrounds and walk throughs of this audacious architectural complex were now the al fresco home of more than two score hell beasts. They slept in the courtyards. They rested in the narrow gaps between the squat main block and the cigar-tin-shaped bronze block. They perched near the Richard Serra sculpture. They roosted in the trees; and they clung somehow to the sheer sides of the office buildings.
These were the giants of Demon City. Creatures who resembled mutated dinosaurs. Huge winged beasts who were like dragons but stranger and more terrifying. And vast multiple-headed monsters who had footprints larger than a lion’s entire body. These ELDs (Extra Large Demons) were mainly black and red and incolorate, since the green demons were usually smaller, more like humans in size.
All these creatures were too big to exist inside an office or an apartment. So they lived on the streets and found their nests wherever there was warmth and light. Which generally meant next to City skyscrapers or inside their central atria; or along the length of the street known as London Wall, which was now the night-time home for the greatest monsters the world has ever known.
And here, close to the Serra sculpture, were the three children of the demon Naberius, who were cradling their mother Callia. She was three-elephants in size and black of hide, with a tongue that was a dagger. But despite her fearsome aspect, she was a delicate creature. Two-legged and almost human in appearance, except for the size and colour and the dagger-tongue and the bat wings; and exceptionally beautiful.
She was lost, entirely, in grief.
Her three children, the offspring of black and red demon intermarriage, were living proof of the randomness of the demonic gene pool; for none of them looked like either of their parents. Instead, they were rainbow-coloured six-legged dragonesques; none had yet reached adulthood, though each of them was twice as high as a human man.
They mourned for a father they had known to be kind, and generous, and loving, and true. And they howled his name to the night-time sky:
‘Naberius!’
Chapter 21
Dougie stood near the steps of St Paul’s, just below the bloodline. It was a grey day. Dougie felt drained. And utterly depressed. Five Squad’s job was over. The warlock Gogarty was dead, and it was certain he could never rise again. And the demon Naberius was dead too.
So why didn’t he feel happy?
St Paul’s Churchyard and the surrounding streets were thronged with mourners. Dougie knew that the lines of grieving demons ran all the way back to the stone dragon guarding the City bounds at the Law Courts.
There were creatures of every hue and shape here. So many of them, and so strange, that they began to seem normal. There were red demons with horns and tails. And black demons with gleaming hides and fangs and eerily flicking bifurcated tongues. And incolorate demons, whose presence seemed to suck the light and colour out of anything they stood beside. Green demons too were there in abundance, with their lizard-like skins and bulging snouts; all with sad eyes.
Hosts of bestial demons were there also; giant chimaerical creatures whose bodies melded lions or bears or eagles or bulls or wild dogs; their incongruous body parts mashed together in monstrously varied mutations.
There too were the bird-like and insect-like and pterodactyl-like and dragonesque demons. Many of whom hovered motionless above the square, even though there was no updraft.
Quite a few humans had decided to join in the funeral procession. Not just the news crews but demon-loving New Agers and provocatively dressed Goth groupies, and ethnologists, and tourists who wanted to take photographs of a good old demon funeral.
Dougie could hear the funeral cortège long before he saw it. The distant sound of horns. The beat of a drum with Creole rhythms. Harmonicas. A crooning discord of voices that spoke of something eternal in the human spirit. It made his blood tingle. Dougie hated the creatures from hell, but he had to admit they knew how to remember their dead. After all, it was a bigger deal for them than for humans: for in their previous incarnation in the Hell dimension, these demonic entities could never die.
How old had Naberius been? Two thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand years old? He was one of the semi-demi-royal demons, the descendant of a bastard half-blood child of a true Luciferan Demon. He had been a Marquis of Hell, according to the PNC’s database. Dougie had read all the lore, he knew every reference to this creature, from the Pseudomonarchium Demonum to the invocations by warlocks written in pre-Christian times.
Dougie was aware that most demons had assumed they would continue to be immortal on Earth, as they had been in their own dimension. It came as a profound shock to them when they realised that human beings had managed to devise ways of killing them, including the use of silver bullets, silver swords, and exorcism.
For the creatures from the Devil’s Void, life had got a lot more dangerous.
The music drew closer. Dougie could see the members of the band as they rose up Ludgate Hill. Some were walking slowly, many were limping, but others jived as they walked with all the unbounded energy they had enjoyed in their prime.
At the head of the procession a clarinet player was rolling his head like a boxer as he wove his stick energetically in the air. The playing was hot; it swung. It was, Dougie knew, true jazz. The truest you could get.
Behind the stick player were a trio of trombonists, and then the saxophonists and cornet and trumpet players, and a swaggering row of harmonica players. There were acoustic guitarists too, singing and playing as they walked, and percussionists, and singers clapping. The bass drummer was the tail end Charlie, beating a straight 4/4 rhythm as a knell. Giving a rhythmic structure to the syncopation of the Creole drums being thrashed by the black-skinned percussionist in his grey suit and grey tie and 1920s flat cap.
It was a funeral combo steeped in the New Orleans tradition, comprised entirely of long dead jazz musicians, walking through the streets of modern London.
The saxophones wailed. The harmonicas crooned. The trumpets bitterly lamented. The singers groaned their angry lyrics atop this moving river of music. This was the Band of the Damned, and they were playing old style jazz, African cross-rhythmed, haunted by blue notes. To honour the passing of an old style giant among demons.
For Naberius, Dougie had learned, had been hugely respected by his kind. He was renowned as a scholar, and a philosopher, and was a pioneer of a form of ethical demonology whose adherents declined to commit any uncoerced acts of evil. All of Five Squad was now aware that if it had not been for the warlock’s spell-binding, Naberius would never have committed the crimes he had.
Dougie knew better than anyone that Naberius had be
en an innocent pawn in Gogarty’s conspiracy. A coerced pawn of the warlock, not a collaborator. A victim, in other words; just like Melissa Anderson was a victim, and Matthew Baker, and Sarah Penhall, and Julia Penhall, and all the rest of them. That knowledge was souring Dougie’s good mood. He’d come here to gloat, but it was proving hard to do so.
The band were playing one of Dougie’s favourite tunes. An old English folk song that had later become a blues classic. A haunting song about a man seeing his true love, pale and naked and dead, in the morgue of St James’ Infirmary.
Dougie spotted his first familiar face: a blind man in a black suit, with white whiskers and wobbly legs. It was, he was sure of it, Blind Willie Johnson. A gospel singer who had died of syphilis, and who had spent his last days dossing down in the ruins of his own burned-out home. Hard faced. Gravel-toned. Lyrics mangled by his rasping voice as he spat out a song of pain and grief.
He spotted another of his musical heroes. Over there, amongst the cluster of Mississippi Delta guitarists, was the dapper and handsome Robert Johnson, playing devilish licks on his guitar as he groaned away in harmony with Willie.
Behind Robert was that crazy fool Little Walter in a ridiculous zoot suit, adding blues harmonica in his inimitable fashion. A dangerous motherfucker without a doubt; but man, he could play.
A tenor saxophone wailed. Dougie guessed Lester Young from the evocative sound; the guess confirmed when he saw the pork pie hat approaching. But there were two other saxophonists a few yards behind that Dougie didn’t recognise. He didn’t know the cornet players either.
A posse of women swaggered in the middle of the band, adding scat riffs to Blind Willie’s melody. Slim black women with powerful blues voices; and older fat mamas like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. The skinny high yellow girl singing alongside Bessie was a stranger to him. And damn it all, she was good.
Dougie wished he had the balls to go up to the musicians he didn’t know and ask for their names and biographies and even autographs. But that was impossible. For he was Babylon. Despised by all. And besides, they were all dead. And Dougie hated the damned as much as they hated him.
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